Oh, yes, baseball. Before October ends, some mention must be made of baseball.
As much as I hate to sound like an old fogey, (for which title I am coming very close to qualifying, at age 56) I miss the World Series of my childhood and youth.
My childhood and youth, roughly 1955-1975, were the days when the World Series was a big deal. I carry a residual pocketful of that big deal into my old age. Each year I do pay attention to who plays in the World Series, even if I don't watch it.
Indeed, during some years I don't watch the World Series. If neither team involved means anything to me, why bother? The 2010 Series pitted the Texas Rangers against the San Francisco Giants. San Francisco won (for the first time since 1954) and my pal Doug Parker, in Reno, NV, a rabid Giants fan, went crazy.
I ignored the whole business. Giants? Rangers? Who cared?
This year, 2011, the World Series has the Rangers (again) this time against the St. Louis Cardinals. As of this writing, the outcome is undecided. Game Six was scheduled for last night, St. Louis time. That's five O'clock in the morning where I am, in Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. I got up before dawn this morning to see the game (MLB.TV provides it on the Internet for those of us in foreign countries) only to find that it was raining in St. Louis. Game Six had been rained out.
Why before dawn? Because when it's 8 p.m. in St. Louis, it's five O'clock the next morning in Tbilisi.
I made some coffee and stayed up. I had to go to school and teach later anyway.
But as I drank my coffee I was wondering who, outside of the sovereign states of Texas and Missouri, and among natives of those two states who may have migrated elsewhere, might actually be bothering to watch.
The Series just ain't the big deal it was when we schoolchildren of the JFK era who happened to go home for lunch would get special permission to bring transistor radios back to school with us so we could follow the game during recess. (In those days, before prime-time advertising rates dictated life itself, the World Series was played in the afternoon, believe it or not.)
It's hard to believe, in today's 999-channel cable TV world, that the World Series ever riveted America's October imagination. But it did. It really did. For you old movie buffs, remember the scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in which Jack Nicholson, a troublemaker in a mental hospital, kicks up a fuss about wanting to "watch the goddamn World Series?" It was once that big a deal. People would turn from their work just long enough to check the score. Teachers would sometimes let their pupils know what was going on in the game -- I remember sitting in my fourth grade classroom one afternoon and my teacher wrote on the blackboard, "Dodgers 5, Yankees 2." We cared that much.
I'm watching, from Tbilisi. I have never set foot in Texas except to change planes there on my way somewhere else, and as for Missouri, well, I've driven across it three times, once stayed two nights in Kansas City, but although I have driven through St. Louis a couple of times, I never got out of my car there.
So what do I care? I think I just explained that. We used to. And some old habits are hard to break, although there are plenty of ex-baseball fans around -- their numbers took an uptick after 1994, when the World Series was canceled for the first time in 90 years thanks to a players' strike. With some players making a gazillion dollars a year by then, many fans wondered what the players were whining about, and stopped going to the ballpark. My, how things had changed in 20 years. In 1974 the players finally got rid of the century-old "reserve clause" which had kept them in virtual serfdom to the team owners since the 19th century, with no bargaining power at all. The abolition of the reserve clause made players into "free agents" once they had played the agreed number of seasons, eligible to peddle their talents to the highest bidder.
By 1994 the players were making such ungodly amounts of money that player salaries were the only baseball-related subject some people wanted to talk about. When pitcher Kevin Brown signed a seven-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1999 for $100 million, eyeballs rolled all over America. Justifiably, I'd say.
But what else can I say? Some of us are just incorrigibles when it comes to baseball. Many of my generation are, and certainly our parents were. We grew up at the tail end of the era in which baseball was still America's Number One sport. The NFL didn't kick baseball off the Nielsen summit until the late 1960s, when Vietnam and urban unrest gave America such an insatiable appetite for eleven-on-eleven violence.
That era was quite unapologetic about its fondness for broken bones: a TV special about football, circa 1970, was entitled Mayhem On A Sunday Afternoon. (You'll get no argument out of me. Professional football was, and is, about celebrating violence. I don't care for it.)
But I haven't answered my own question. What do I care about a Rangers-Cardinals matchup? Last year I ignored the Rangers and Giants.
Well, baseball has been around so long that it has generated history. The first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, hung out its shingle in 1869. That was a while ago. (The NFL, on the other hand, didn't really "take off" until the advent of television. TV and pro football pretty much invented each other.)
History: the St. Louis Cardinals have a long and venerable "regimental history" which, for my father's dead generation, might center around the "Gas House Gang" of the 1930s, but whose dawn, for me, was the year 1964, in which the Cards, featuring ruthless righthanded pitcher Bob Gibson and the bats of such as Dick Groat, Curt Flood and Tim McCarver, brought to an ignominious (read: glorious) end a New York Yankees dynasty that had been going on boringly, season after season, since 1949. The 1950s had belonged to the Yankees, but after their World Series loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960, the Yankees did a long fade. After the Cardinals dispatched the aging Mickey Mantle-Whitey Ford Yankees in that '64 Series, the Yankees did not even appear again in the Series for more than a decade.
By the way, here is a Stan Musial Fun Fact for all Yankee haters especially: Musial's career numbers were actually better than Mickey Mantle's. But Mantle got all the publicity because he played in (ugh) New York, where all the media were headquartered in those days. Musial played out in the hinterland, far from WOR, WNBC, Time-Life and the Herald Tribune, so he got short shrift.
Anyway, thank you, Cardinals, for what you did to the Yankees in '64. (And by the way, thanks also to the 1963 Los Angeles Dodgers, ((sorry, Doug)) who set the table for that wonderfully humiliating imperial downfall, beating the Yankees in the '63 Series four games to zip behind the overwhelming pitching of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.)
Oh, hell, while we're at it, (since Yankee fans hate being reminded), thanks also to the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, and Bill Mazeroski, who broke the Bronx' heart in a premonitory flicker of Goetterdaemmerung, jerking Series victory from the Yankees' jaws with a ninth-inning home run. It was the beginning of a most delicious end. (I read somewhere that on the way back to New York after losing that game to Mazeroski's homer, Mickey Mantle cried. You cried for New York's sins of pride, Mickey. Bless your shade, but I relish those tears.)
But in the final analysis, it was the the seasons of 1963 and '64 which were the one-two punch that rid America of the Yankees for 13 years, and I thank the teams responsible.
I'm happy to report, as well, that the Yankees' "comeback" in the late 1970s was brief -- they rapidly faded again.
They made it to the Series in 1981, a season partially devalued because it was truncated. Between June 12 and July 31 of that year the players were on strike. As a shortened season, 1981 had a question mark over it in the eyes of many baseball purists. After all, a total of 713 games were canceled by that six-week strike.
But the strike notwithstanding, the Yankees made it to the World Series in '81 only to fall to their old enemies the Dodgers, who, strike or no, had young screwball-phenomenon Fernando Valenzuela baffling hitters left and right.
The Yankees did not appear in the World Series again until 1996. For 15 consecutive seasons there were no Yankees anywhere near the World Series -- any right-thinking baseball fan's idea of bliss. Whatever you might think in retrospect of the "Yuppified" 1980s, New York baseball in that decade was all about the Mets, not the Yankees. I don't like the Mets because I don't any New York sports franchise -- they all come with the New York-based media in tow as cheerleaders. But I hate no team on earth like I hate the Yankees. For decades their sense of entitlement, rooted in spending more money than some countries, was truly nauseating. I, too, could have 156 World Series titles if I spent money on players the way the Soviet Union spent it on tanks, and that's precisely what the Yankees did for years. And they deserve the Soviet Union's fate.
But getting back to my subject, which is why I would care at all about a 2011 World Series matchup between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers...
It was largely because of that 1964 Yankees-Cardinals Series, played on the eve of my ninth birthday, that I've had a lifelong soft spot for the Cardinals. They delivered the coup de grace to the Yankees' dynasty. God bless them.
So ... I rooted for the Cards in the '68 Series against Detroit. (They lost.) I rooted for them in the '85 Series against Kansas City. (They not only lost, they got stomped on -- that October belonged to Royals' pitcher Brett Saberhagen.)
I rooted for them again in the 2006 Series, a reprise of their contest against Denny McLain, Mickey Lolich and the unbeatable Detroit Tigers of 38 years earlier. But by 2006 Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich were long gone, as were Alan Trammel and many other legendary Tigers of yore, and the Cardinals won!
An odd little coincidence: in 1968, when the Cardinals lost the World Series to the Tigers, my family was living in Spokane, Washington. Spokane was not my home town; my father just happened to be stationed there at the time.
In 2006, when the Cardinals and Tigers faced each other in the Series again, I just happened to be living in Spokane again.
I had not lived there in more than 30 years. But my second wife Valerie and I were running a bed-and-breakfast in Spokane in 2006, a short-lived business which lasted less than a year, before Valerie hauled off and moved back to her own home town of Washington, D.C., tired of both the B&B business and me. (After nine months.)
In fact, once she had spent my inheritance from my father, throwing it away on a failing business she had already decided to abandon, my wife then headed straight for divorce court to jettison me. Having spent my inheritance, she had no further use for me either.
But on the last night of the 2006 World Series, Detroit vs. St. Louis, I took my soon-to-be ex-wife, who was a hockey fan, to a game between the Seattle Thunderbirds and the Spokane Chiefs. She watched the hockey game; I spent most of the hockey game out in the sports arena concourse following the final game of the World Series on the flat-screen monitor.
But talking about Texas baseball. The Rangers are such Johnny-come- latelies that I still think of them as an expansion team. They've only been around since 1971. Forty years -- that's last month in baseball time.
Now, the story of how they became the Texas Rangers is indeed steeped in baseball history -- in this case, the history of one of baseball's all-time losingest franchises.
In 1971, after two incarnations, the hapless Washington Senators, who had already left Washington once, (in 1961 they moved to Minneapolis and became the Minnesota Twins) left Washington again. For many years, our nation's capital lived under the cloud of being thought "not a baseball town." D.C. goes nuts every fall for the Redskins, but couldn't make much of the Senators, not that anyone could. In their entire existence as a franchise, the Senators won one (count 'em) one World Series, that of 1924. They had Walter "The Big Train" Johnson pitching for them, but not much else.
They were revived in 1961, but nothing, not even being managed for a short time by the legendary Ted Williams, could breathe much life into the moribund baseball situation in Washington, D.C. In 1971 the Senators moved to Arlington, Texas and became The Rangers. So D.C. has given the American League two pretty good baseball franchises, it's just that they never played pretty good baseball in Washington. They had to go somewhere else to do it.
 |
The Texas Rangers and the St. Louis
Cardinals square off in the 2011 World Series.
|
As much as I hate to sound like an old fogey, (for which title I am coming very close to qualifying, at age 56) I miss the World Series of my childhood and youth.
My childhood and youth, roughly 1955-1975, were the days when the World Series was a big deal. I carry a residual pocketful of that big deal into my old age. Each year I do pay attention to who plays in the World Series, even if I don't watch it.
Indeed, during some years I don't watch the World Series. If neither team involved means anything to me, why bother? The 2010 Series pitted the Texas Rangers against the San Francisco Giants. San Francisco won (for the first time since 1954) and my pal Doug Parker, in Reno, NV, a rabid Giants fan, went crazy.
I ignored the whole business. Giants? Rangers? Who cared?
This year, 2011, the World Series has the Rangers (again) this time against the St. Louis Cardinals. As of this writing, the outcome is undecided. Game Six was scheduled for last night, St. Louis time. That's five O'clock in the morning where I am, in Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. I got up before dawn this morning to see the game (MLB.TV provides it on the Internet for those of us in foreign countries) only to find that it was raining in St. Louis. Game Six had been rained out.
Why before dawn? Because when it's 8 p.m. in St. Louis, it's five O'clock the next morning in Tbilisi.
I made some coffee and stayed up. I had to go to school and teach later anyway.
But as I drank my coffee I was wondering who, outside of the sovereign states of Texas and Missouri, and among natives of those two states who may have migrated elsewhere, might actually be bothering to watch.
The Series just ain't the big deal it was when we schoolchildren of the JFK era who happened to go home for lunch would get special permission to bring transistor radios back to school with us so we could follow the game during recess. (In those days, before prime-time advertising rates dictated life itself, the World Series was played in the afternoon, believe it or not.)
It's hard to believe, in today's 999-channel cable TV world, that the World Series ever riveted America's October imagination. But it did. It really did. For you old movie buffs, remember the scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in which Jack Nicholson, a troublemaker in a mental hospital, kicks up a fuss about wanting to "watch the goddamn World Series?" It was once that big a deal. People would turn from their work just long enough to check the score. Teachers would sometimes let their pupils know what was going on in the game -- I remember sitting in my fourth grade classroom one afternoon and my teacher wrote on the blackboard, "Dodgers 5, Yankees 2." We cared that much.
I'm watching, from Tbilisi. I have never set foot in Texas except to change planes there on my way somewhere else, and as for Missouri, well, I've driven across it three times, once stayed two nights in Kansas City, but although I have driven through St. Louis a couple of times, I never got out of my car there.
So what do I care? I think I just explained that. We used to. And some old habits are hard to break, although there are plenty of ex-baseball fans around -- their numbers took an uptick after 1994, when the World Series was canceled for the first time in 90 years thanks to a players' strike. With some players making a gazillion dollars a year by then, many fans wondered what the players were whining about, and stopped going to the ballpark. My, how things had changed in 20 years. In 1974 the players finally got rid of the century-old "reserve clause" which had kept them in virtual serfdom to the team owners since the 19th century, with no bargaining power at all. The abolition of the reserve clause made players into "free agents" once they had played the agreed number of seasons, eligible to peddle their talents to the highest bidder.
By 1994 the players were making such ungodly amounts of money that player salaries were the only baseball-related subject some people wanted to talk about. When pitcher Kevin Brown signed a seven-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1999 for $100 million, eyeballs rolled all over America. Justifiably, I'd say.
But what else can I say? Some of us are just incorrigibles when it comes to baseball. Many of my generation are, and certainly our parents were. We grew up at the tail end of the era in which baseball was still America's Number One sport. The NFL didn't kick baseball off the Nielsen summit until the late 1960s, when Vietnam and urban unrest gave America such an insatiable appetite for eleven-on-eleven violence.
That era was quite unapologetic about its fondness for broken bones: a TV special about football, circa 1970, was entitled Mayhem On A Sunday Afternoon. (You'll get no argument out of me. Professional football was, and is, about celebrating violence. I don't care for it.)
But I haven't answered my own question. What do I care about a Rangers-Cardinals matchup? Last year I ignored the Rangers and Giants.
Well, baseball has been around so long that it has generated history. The first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, hung out its shingle in 1869. That was a while ago. (The NFL, on the other hand, didn't really "take off" until the advent of television. TV and pro football pretty much invented each other.)
History: the St. Louis Cardinals have a long and venerable "regimental history" which, for my father's dead generation, might center around the "Gas House Gang" of the 1930s, but whose dawn, for me, was the year 1964, in which the Cards, featuring ruthless righthanded pitcher Bob Gibson and the bats of such as Dick Groat, Curt Flood and Tim McCarver, brought to an ignominious (read: glorious) end a New York Yankees dynasty that had been going on boringly, season after season, since 1949. The 1950s had belonged to the Yankees, but after their World Series loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960, the Yankees did a long fade. After the Cardinals dispatched the aging Mickey Mantle-Whitey Ford Yankees in that '64 Series, the Yankees did not even appear again in the Series for more than a decade.
By the way, here is a Stan Musial Fun Fact for all Yankee haters especially: Musial's career numbers were actually better than Mickey Mantle's. But Mantle got all the publicity because he played in (ugh) New York, where all the media were headquartered in those days. Musial played out in the hinterland, far from WOR, WNBC, Time-Life and the Herald Tribune, so he got short shrift.
Anyway, thank you, Cardinals, for what you did to the Yankees in '64. (And by the way, thanks also to the 1963 Los Angeles Dodgers, ((sorry, Doug)) who set the table for that wonderfully humiliating imperial downfall, beating the Yankees in the '63 Series four games to zip behind the overwhelming pitching of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.)
Oh, hell, while we're at it, (since Yankee fans hate being reminded), thanks also to the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, and Bill Mazeroski, who broke the Bronx' heart in a premonitory flicker of Goetterdaemmerung, jerking Series victory from the Yankees' jaws with a ninth-inning home run. It was the beginning of a most delicious end. (I read somewhere that on the way back to New York after losing that game to Mazeroski's homer, Mickey Mantle cried. You cried for New York's sins of pride, Mickey. Bless your shade, but I relish those tears.)
But in the final analysis, it was the the seasons of 1963 and '64 which were the one-two punch that rid America of the Yankees for 13 years, and I thank the teams responsible.
I'm happy to report, as well, that the Yankees' "comeback" in the late 1970s was brief -- they rapidly faded again.
They made it to the Series in 1981, a season partially devalued because it was truncated. Between June 12 and July 31 of that year the players were on strike. As a shortened season, 1981 had a question mark over it in the eyes of many baseball purists. After all, a total of 713 games were canceled by that six-week strike.
But the strike notwithstanding, the Yankees made it to the World Series in '81 only to fall to their old enemies the Dodgers, who, strike or no, had young screwball-phenomenon Fernando Valenzuela baffling hitters left and right.
The Yankees did not appear in the World Series again until 1996. For 15 consecutive seasons there were no Yankees anywhere near the World Series -- any right-thinking baseball fan's idea of bliss. Whatever you might think in retrospect of the "Yuppified" 1980s, New York baseball in that decade was all about the Mets, not the Yankees. I don't like the Mets because I don't any New York sports franchise -- they all come with the New York-based media in tow as cheerleaders. But I hate no team on earth like I hate the Yankees. For decades their sense of entitlement, rooted in spending more money than some countries, was truly nauseating. I, too, could have 156 World Series titles if I spent money on players the way the Soviet Union spent it on tanks, and that's precisely what the Yankees did for years. And they deserve the Soviet Union's fate.
 |
Detroit lefthander Mickey Lolich helped
vanquish the St. Louis Cardinals
in the 1968 World Series. I was 13 at the time,
living in Spokane, Washington.
|
But getting back to my subject, which is why I would care at all about a 2011 World Series matchup between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers...
It was largely because of that 1964 Yankees-Cardinals Series, played on the eve of my ninth birthday, that I've had a lifelong soft spot for the Cardinals. They delivered the coup de grace to the Yankees' dynasty. God bless them.
So ... I rooted for the Cards in the '68 Series against Detroit. (They lost.) I rooted for them in the '85 Series against Kansas City. (They not only lost, they got stomped on -- that October belonged to Royals' pitcher Brett Saberhagen.)
I rooted for them again in the 2006 Series, a reprise of their contest against Denny McLain, Mickey Lolich and the unbeatable Detroit Tigers of 38 years earlier. But by 2006 Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich were long gone, as were Alan Trammel and many other legendary Tigers of yore, and the Cardinals won!
An odd little coincidence: in 1968, when the Cardinals lost the World Series to the Tigers, my family was living in Spokane, Washington. Spokane was not my home town; my father just happened to be stationed there at the time.
In 2006, when the Cardinals and Tigers faced each other in the Series again, I just happened to be living in Spokane again.
I had not lived there in more than 30 years. But my second wife Valerie and I were running a bed-and-breakfast in Spokane in 2006, a short-lived business which lasted less than a year, before Valerie hauled off and moved back to her own home town of Washington, D.C., tired of both the B&B business and me. (After nine months.)
In fact, once she had spent my inheritance from my father, throwing it away on a failing business she had already decided to abandon, my wife then headed straight for divorce court to jettison me. Having spent my inheritance, she had no further use for me either.
But on the last night of the 2006 World Series, Detroit vs. St. Louis, I took my soon-to-be ex-wife, who was a hockey fan, to a game between the Seattle Thunderbirds and the Spokane Chiefs. She watched the hockey game; I spent most of the hockey game out in the sports arena concourse following the final game of the World Series on the flat-screen monitor.
 |
38 years later,St. Louis catcher Yadier Molina
exulted in his team's 2006 World Series victory over the Detroit
Tigers. By coincidence, I was living in Spokane,
Washington again at the time.
|
Now, the story of how they became the Texas Rangers is indeed steeped in baseball history -- in this case, the history of one of baseball's all-time losingest franchises.
In 1971, after two incarnations, the hapless Washington Senators, who had already left Washington once, (in 1961 they moved to Minneapolis and became the Minnesota Twins) left Washington again. For many years, our nation's capital lived under the cloud of being thought "not a baseball town." D.C. goes nuts every fall for the Redskins, but couldn't make much of the Senators, not that anyone could. In their entire existence as a franchise, the Senators won one (count 'em) one World Series, that of 1924. They had Walter "The Big Train" Johnson pitching for them, but not much else.
They were revived in 1961, but nothing, not even being managed for a short time by the legendary Ted Williams, could breathe much life into the moribund baseball situation in Washington, D.C. In 1971 the Senators moved to Arlington, Texas and became The Rangers. So D.C. has given the American League two pretty good baseball franchises, it's just that they never played pretty good baseball in Washington. They had to go somewhere else to do it.
And after the "second" Senators left in '71, that was it for baseball in Washington for the next 34 years.For that period the D.C.- Baltimore corridor belonged exclusively to the Orioles and their porcine owner (read: pig) Peter Angelos.
In 2005 baseball returned to D.C. in the form of a new National League franchise, which the city and team ownership wisely agreed should NOT be called "The Senators." (Baseball aside, the public image of politicians in America has sunk so low in the past 50 years that I can't imagine anything but a street gang calling itself "The Senators" anymore.) The 2011 Washington Nationals just wrapped up their seventh season in the stadium D.C. built for them just south of Capitol Hill. (I've been there, and as a stadium it's no great shakes; surely no comparison can be made with Baltimore's lovely Camden Yards. But D.C. baseball fans have a team again, and the capital no longer has to live with the dismissive notion that it's "not a baseball town.")
By the way, baseball's departure from and return to Washington was a question of the pathetic shuffling off after the pathetic. Teams have always moved around, of course. But how Washington, D.C. got baseball back was noteworthy for its similarity to how D.C. lost baseball in the first place. Just as the pathetic Senators had packed up and left town in 1961, then left again 10 years later, D.C.'s search for a new team took it to baseball's version of the fire sale: the pathetic Montreal Expos, after struggling in their Canadian berth for three decades without winning so much as a pennant, finally decided to roll up their tents and accept Washington, D.C.'s invitation to acquire a new home and a new name. Hence, in 2005, the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals. Sic gloria transit.
This does not mean, by the way, that Canada will not support major-league baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays are doing quite well, thank you, in fact nearly 20 years ago (that's last week in baseball time) my father and I had a wonderful time watching the Jays dispatch the Atlanta Braves in the World Series of 1992, the first Series ever to involve a team from outside the United States.
In 2005 baseball returned to D.C. in the form of a new National League franchise, which the city and team ownership wisely agreed should NOT be called "The Senators." (Baseball aside, the public image of politicians in America has sunk so low in the past 50 years that I can't imagine anything but a street gang calling itself "The Senators" anymore.) The 2011 Washington Nationals just wrapped up their seventh season in the stadium D.C. built for them just south of Capitol Hill. (I've been there, and as a stadium it's no great shakes; surely no comparison can be made with Baltimore's lovely Camden Yards. But D.C. baseball fans have a team again, and the capital no longer has to live with the dismissive notion that it's "not a baseball town.")
By the way, baseball's departure from and return to Washington was a question of the pathetic shuffling off after the pathetic. Teams have always moved around, of course. But how Washington, D.C. got baseball back was noteworthy for its similarity to how D.C. lost baseball in the first place. Just as the pathetic Senators had packed up and left town in 1961, then left again 10 years later, D.C.'s search for a new team took it to baseball's version of the fire sale: the pathetic Montreal Expos, after struggling in their Canadian berth for three decades without winning so much as a pennant, finally decided to roll up their tents and accept Washington, D.C.'s invitation to acquire a new home and a new name. Hence, in 2005, the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals. Sic gloria transit.
This does not mean, by the way, that Canada will not support major-league baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays are doing quite well, thank you, in fact nearly 20 years ago (that's last week in baseball time) my father and I had a wonderful time watching the Jays dispatch the Atlanta Braves in the World Series of 1992, the first Series ever to involve a team from outside the United States.
The Rangers play in Arlington, which is not far from Dallas, but too far for them to call themselves the Dallas Rangers, which is why they're called the Texas Rangers. The California Angels were called the California Angels for precisely the same reason. Initially, the Angels played at the Los Angeles colisseum and therefore called themselves the Los Angeles Angels. But after they had had a stadium built for themselves in Anaheim, they couldn't call themselves the "Los Angeles" Angels anymore.
Nobody knows where Anaheim is (unless they live there, or have been to Disneyland) so they couldn't be the Anaheim Angels: that's not good marketing.
"California Angels" was a good compromise, I thought. And it lasted for years. Why not? "California Angels." It sounds good. It sounded good for years.
But then greed got into the picture again. With the advent of interleague play, and in the greedy hope of creating a phony rivalry with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Angels were renamed The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. I am not making this up. When this marketing move went down half a dozen years ago, wise guys in my home town of San Diego claimed they could just as easily rename the Padres "The Los Angeles Padres of San Diego." Would have made just about as much sense, except the Padres and the Dodgers are both in the National League, which would preclude World Series matchup. Darn.
Hence, until someone figures out a way to sell the idea of the Rangers as "The Dallas Rangers of Arlington," they will remain The Texas Rangers. It's okay with me.
Nobody knows where Anaheim is (unless they live there, or have been to Disneyland) so they couldn't be the Anaheim Angels: that's not good marketing.
"California Angels" was a good compromise, I thought. And it lasted for years. Why not? "California Angels." It sounds good. It sounded good for years.
But then greed got into the picture again. With the advent of interleague play, and in the greedy hope of creating a phony rivalry with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Angels were renamed The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. I am not making this up. When this marketing move went down half a dozen years ago, wise guys in my home town of San Diego claimed they could just as easily rename the Padres "The Los Angeles Padres of San Diego." Would have made just about as much sense, except the Padres and the Dodgers are both in the National League, which would preclude World Series matchup. Darn.
Hence, until someone figures out a way to sell the idea of the Rangers as "The Dallas Rangers of Arlington," they will remain The Texas Rangers. It's okay with me.
The Texas Rangers have had their share of great players. I can think of two off the top of my head: Nolan Ryan and Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod sold out to Satan, (the New York Yankees, the closest thing to Evil Incarnate that the earth currently knows.) but Ryan, possibly the greatest pitcher of his generation, liked playing in his home state of Texas and spent much of his career first with the Houston Astros and then with the Rangers. My father was not a Rangers fan, but he adored Nolan Ryan. One Father's Day we all chipped in and bought him a mounted, autographed color photograph of Ryan taken at the moment he threw his legendary 5,000th strikeout, Aug. 22nd, 1989. He was in a Rangers uniform that night. (And sweaty.) When my father died this picture reverted to me. It was destroyed in a kitchen fire in Spokane in January, 2007 which also destroyed a lot of my other baseball memorabilia.
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Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers throws his 5000th
strikeout, Aug. 22nd, 1989.
|
I would like to see the Cardinals win the 2011 Series, but it's probably going to be Texas' year. As I sat down to write this, Game Six of the 2011 Series had just been rained out in St. Louis, (after I got up at 5 a.m. in Tbilisi to watch it), but the Rangers were leading the Series three games to two. Why do I think it may be Texas' year? For one thing, the Rangers came very close to taking all the marbles last year, only to give them all up to the Giants, so one could argue that they're due. (Even after a mere 40 years as a franchise -- the 2010 Giants hadn't won a Series in 55 years, and they have existed as a franchise for nearly a century: the Giants started out as the New York Gothams in 1883, moved to San Francisco in 1958.) The Rangers have never won a Series, but in 2010 they did become the first team from Texas ever to win a Series game. (The Astros played in the 2005 Series, but were swept in four games by the Chicago White Sox.)
So here I sit in Georgia, that's Georgia as in Mikhail Saakashvili, not Ted Turner. The big sports here are soccer and rugby. The school kids are always asking me who my favorite football team is, and they mean soccer. I never know what to tell them.
And right now, to be honest, I'd have trouble telling them what my favorite baseball team is. I'm just about sick and tired of the Padres. I was a fan of the Padres for years, but in recent seasons they seem more interested in saving money than in winning games. Does San Diego deserve my baseball loyalty just because I happened to grow up there? Such soul-searching questions are the stuff of early mornings these days, you know, like this morning, when I was sitting here sucking up coffee at 5:30 a.m. because the World Series had been rained out.
I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the Cardinals, thanks to Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, Willie McGee, and yes, even Mark McGwire, bless his back-to-normal body now that he's off the steroids (and by the way, working as a hitting coach for the Cardinals.) I'll always be grateful to St. Louis for the '64 Series, ashamed of them for the '85 Series, and cheering my lungs out for them when and if they ever face the hated Yankees again in October.
But if the Rangers win, I won't be heartbroken.
Better than having the Giants win. That's a SoCal thing. Everyone north of the Tehachepis hates the Dodgers, and everyone south of the Tehachepis hates the Giants. It's history: this used to be Brooklyn and Manhattan hating each other. Now it's the two ends of the San Andreas Fault hating each other. Same old hatred, relocated: Manhattan vs. Brooklyn (1895-1957); Los Angeles vs. San Francisco (1958-Present.)
The earthquake will probably settle it all.
The earthquake will probably settle it all.
Meanwhile, as Tevye said in Fiddler on the Roof: TRADITION!!
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